


The First Day

by radiofreekerberos



Series: Ocean of Storms [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Keith (Voltron), Galra Keith (Voltron), M/M, Protective Keith (Voltron), Sad Shiro (Voltron), Sheith Month 2017, Shiro (Voltron) Whump, Shiro has a bit of PTSD in every universe, Voltron au, Whump Fic, mer!Keith, mermaid au, merman Keith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-14 17:38:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11788101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radiofreekerberos/pseuds/radiofreekerberos
Summary: Shiro is the sole survivor of a plane crash who finds himself stranded on a deserted island with a young man without a name and a dark secret to keep. Part three of the Ocean of Storms series.A face swims into view, tilted downward to regard Shiro with mild curiosity. Shiro startles at the delicate almost elfin features and dark violet eyes staring back at him. An odd feeling of déjà vu paints his skin in sudden goosebumps. “Do I… know you?” he asks, his brow wrinkling in bemusement.





	The First Day

**Author's Note:**

> Well I have no perspective left, so I hope this didn't read like a hot mess. For those interested in reading more, I am writing a sequel.

Shiro wakes choking. He lurches onto his side and urgently coughs up seawater, his lungs and throat burning as he struggles to breathe. His head is splitting and the hot sun is beating down on him, making him feel dizzy and nauseous. He raises a shaky artificial hand to try to shield his tearing eyes against it. 

Everything is bright, too bright, blurry and bright. He groans and tries to sit up. Almost immediately he vomits more murky seawater onto the fine white sand before him. “Gross,” he grunts hoarsely, wiping his mouth on the damp cuff of his sleeve and carefully laying back down and curling up onto his side.

He feels a little better now. The ringing in his ears begins to recede as his vision clears. Slowly, the fuzzy landscape resolves itself into a long strand of tropical beach. Shiro exhales a long shaky breath, wincing slightly at the throbbing in his temple. 

He swallows a little queasily and gingerly touches the fingers of his left hand to the spot, since he can’t actually feel anything with his right, they come away streaked with blood. He groans, screwing his eyes shut in exasperation. Great, just what he needs, another scar.

Where is he, anyway?

He’s supposed to be in Hawaii right now with Matt. Only, there isn’t a Matt anymore, well not for him. They broke up two months ago, because of Shiro’s “commitment issues.” He seems to recall Matt’s exact words were unfeeling bastard with a heart as numb and cold as his dead right hand. That had hurt, but Shiro didn’t feel right about arguing the point, not after what happened. 

They’d been dating for over a year, and Matt, quite reasonably, had wanted to take their relationship to the next level. He’d wanted them to move in together. Shiro had balked. Matt didn’t understand why, after all Shiro did love him right? Shiro froze, and that’s when they’d both realized he’d never actually said the words. 

_So, say them now!_ Matt had demanded and Shiro had wanted to, so badly. Anything to ease the wounded look on Matt’s face.

And yet _I’m sorry,_ was the only thing he’d seemed able to say.

So Shiro found himself alone again.

Sometimes he wondered if he would ever find whatever it was he was searching for. If it even existed at all. 

He opens his eyes. Did he fall asleep? A slender pair of bare legs are kneeling in front of him and gentle yet efficient fingers are massaging something cool and soothing into his bleeding scalp.

“Hello…?” he murmurs wearily, his voice shredded from hacking up salt water. 

A face swims into view, tilted downward to regard Shiro with mild curiosity. Shiro startles at the delicate almost elfin features and dark violet eyes staring back at him. An odd feeling of déjà vu paints his skin in sudden goosebumps. “Do I… know you?” he asks, his brow wrinkling in bemusement. 

The face disappears, though the gentle ministrations continue, lulling Shiro into a strange sort of twilight sleep. 

He dreams of the plane. The single functioning engine had cut out just before it hit the water and the buckling cabin was swallowed up in inky blackness. The other passenger’s screams vanished in a swirl of dark crushing water. Shiro hadn’t been screaming. Maybe this was the universe’s way of punishing him for what he’d done to Matt, he’d thought. It was stupid, he knew, but their vacation had already been paid for, so he’d decided to take it alone. Both to clear his own head and to spare Matt the pain of having to see him everyday in class. Now no one would ever see him again. Maybe that was exactly what he deserved.

His robotic arm had been pressed up against the window, so he’d used it to get out. There was no thought behind the decision, just instinct, a way to escape the claustrophobic space. He’d thought for a fleeting moment that maybe he could rescue some of the others as well, but the plane had disappeared in an instant, plunging further into the murky depths, and Shiro was suddenly hopelessly alone in the pitch black water. He couldn’t tell which way was up, caught in a vortex of turbulent currents and spiraling debris. The plane had begun to break apart. Something heavy and unyielding hit him and he blacked out.

He wakes somewhere else. The sun is no longer beating down on him and the air is pleasantly cool and tinged with a hint of salt. The throbbing pain in his head has subsided, replaced by weariness and a soothing numbness spreading across his scalp. He gingerly presses his fingers to the wound and finds some sort of dried paste covering it. The rhythmic sound of nearby waves crashing against a rocky coastline fills his ears. It’s oddly soothing, like the white noise machines people sometimes use to lull themselves to sleep. 

A cool hand touches his cheek and Shiro’s eyes shift to the same face he saw on the beach earlier. That sense of recognition comes over him again, a strange mixture of relief and something else, something foreign. Something Shiro’s never felt before. He can’t put a name to it. “Hello,” he says pushing it from his mind. He smiles weakly. “It’s good to see you again. I was afraid I might have hallucinated you.” 

The young man, Shiro estimates his age at a year or two younger than himself, doesn’t answer. He tilts his head slightly, his intense violet eyes narrowing for a moment as he studies Shiro’s face. He brushes the long dark hair from his eyes and helps Shiro sit up with gentle hands, though Shiro can feel the surprising strength in them as well. Surprising for someone so small and whippet thin that is. He doesn’t seem undernourished though, Shiro notes, just lean. Wiry muscles flex easily beneath his pale skin. He’s also totally naked and completely devoid of body hair, which is kind of… weird frankly.

Shiro awkwardly shifts his focus onto his surroundings, which turns out to be a shallow limestone cave. He eyes the grooved walls of blue-gray rock looming over him, worn smooth by years of water erosion, though the space seems dry enough now. The shelf of rock he’d been laying on is covered in a soft blanket of green moss, creating a fairly comfortable sleeping space. The cave ends in an oblong crevice that opens onto the sea below. Every so often, a wave crashes with enough force to send foamy white water spraying past the opening.

“Where… are we?” Shiro asks, squinting past the crevice to the crashing waves below. The young man gives him that look again, his brow knitting slightly as if he’s trying to grasp the meaning behind Shiro’s words. “You don’t speak English, do you,” Shiro says. It’s not a question. The young man stares at him a moment longer then abruptly stands. Shiro hastily averts his gaze to avoid staring at his naked ass. 

He sighs, feeling slightly more alone than he did a few minutes ago. Are there such things as deserted islands in this day and age? Shiro seems to recall that there may be, though he thinks it may have more to do with land rights, or inhospitable climates than uncharted territories these days. 

In the end you’re still stranded in a completely isolated area with little to no contact with the outside world though, so really what’s the difference?

He swallows as the young man sidles over to him, pressing what feels like a rough cup into his hand. Actually it’s an abalone shell, Shiro discovers when he looks down. The rainbow mother-of-pearl interior reflects in the fresh water filling it. “Thank you!” Shiro gasps gratefully and quickly gulps it down. So there’s a fresh water source nearby, good to know.

The young man smiles, his dark violet eyes turning indigo in the shifting sunlight. Shiro finishes his drink with an awkward gulp, suddenly keenly aware of how close they are to each other. He makes a conscious effort to focus on the young man’s face, noting for the first time that his eyes seem too old somehow. A lifetime’s worth of pain and loneliness seems to be reflecting back at him, and Shiro feels suddenly guilty for feeling sorry for himself. “Are you all alone here?” he asks.

“All alone here,” the young man echoes, startling Shiro, though there’s no comprehension behind the words. He’s just parroting what Shiro is saying. Fast learner though, Shiro thinks, smiling wanly. The young man returns the smile. Shiro has so many questions and no way to find the answers. The scientist in him wants to scream. 

“Let’s start with something simple then,” he says aloud. “What’s your name?”

The young man just stares at him blankly.

“Mine’s Shiro,” he offers. The young man’s brow knits slightly and Shiro places his hand on his chest. “Shiro,” he repeats. He points at his own face, “Shiro.”

“Shiro,” the young man says softly.

Shiro nods. “That’s right,” he says, “my name’s Shiro.”

“Shiro,” the young man says a bit more confidently. He seems to understand.

“And you are?” Shiro asks, indicating him with a sweep of his artificial hand. 

The young man’s eyes move from Shiro’s outstretched hand to Shiro’s face then back to his hand again. 

Shiro frowns. He presses his hand to his chest again. “Shiro,” he says and points at the young man expectantly, but all he does is stare at Shiro as if he just fell out of a tree.

Shiro sighs and scrubs his face. “Guess this is gonna be harder than I thought,” he says softly. 

Could it be he doesn’t know his own name?

Judging from his total ignorance of basic social conventions such as clothing, and the lack of any language skills, Shiro theorizes he’s been stranded here for some time, probably since he was a small child. Shiro’s heart goes out to him, even as the more calculating portion of his brain reminds him that doesn’t exactly say much for his own chances of rescue. Then again, if this young man’s been here since early childhood, it’s entirely possible he hasn’t been actively searching for a way to leave. He may not even be aware that there’s anything else out there. 

“Well, I can’t exactly go around calling you naked-guy,” Shiro says thoughtfully, “so how about I give you a name. Just until you can tell me yours. Say nothing if that’s okay with you,” Shiro says dryly.

Not surprisingly, the young man says nothing.

Shiro smiles wanly. “Okay,” he says, shaking his head, “how about… Keith,” he says, saying literally the first name that pops into his head. It might have something to do with the fact that he was briefly obsessed with Keith Moon as a kid, because his last name was Moon. If his last name had been dinosaur, Shiro probably would’ve built some sort of shrine to him. He presses his hand to his chest again, “Shiro.”

“Keith,” the younger man responds, pressing a hand to his own chest with a shy smile.

Shiro smiles back. “Pleased to meet you, Keith,” he says. 

The sun dips below the crevice, bathing the cave in misty twilight. Shiro wonders how quickly the limestone walls lose heat without the sun’s rays to warm them. “Aren’t you cold?” he asks and Keith just blinks at him. “You don’t have a lot of meat on your bones, the lack of natural insulation must make it uncomfortable for you at night. Here,” he says, unbuttoning his shirt, “put this on.” 

He quickly shrugs out of his once white shirt, which is now stained pink at the collar and left shoulder due to his formerly bleeding scalp. He drapes it over Keith’s shoulders. Keith freezes, his eyes wide and his shoulders slumped as if Shiro just encased him in a blanket of iron. It reminds Shiro of the way cats react when their owners dress them up for the internet. 

“You’ll get used to it,” Shiro says, chuckling wryly. “Put your arms through the sleeves.” He leans forward and tugs the shirt open by the lapel to make the sleeve opening more accessible. Reluctantly, Keith slides his arm into it. They repeat the maneuver on the other side, then Shiro buttons the shirt since he guesses, rightly as it turns out, that Keith won’t know what to make of them. 

Keith stares darkly at him, his arms held stiffly at his sides. His compact body is completely lost inside Shiro’s overflowing shirt. The sleeves are about three inches too long. He scowls and indignantly starts flapping his trapped hands in Shiro’s face. Shiro laughs. He unbuttons the cuffs and rolls them up to Keith’s elbows. 

“How’s that?” he asks and Keith smiles, curiously fingering the plastic buttons on the front of the shirt. He switches to inspecting the material after a moment, pinching it between his slender fingers, then his otherworldly eyes shift to Shiro’s face, his brow knitting in silent concern.

“Don’t worry about me,” Shiro says mildly. “I run pretty hot because of this,” he says tapping his artificial arm with a flesh and blood finger. His internal temperature hovers somewhere between 99 and 100 degrees. Too warm to be bothered by most climate fluctuations. The prosthetic is also why he started strength training. The cyber components burn up a lot of energy. Shiro’s surgeon suggested increasing his muscle mass as a way to maintain his body’s natural energy reserves.

Keith silently eyes Shiro’s artificial arm, his gaze fixated on the line of puckered skin where the prosthetic is grafted to Shiro’s flesh. “It’s okay,” Shiro says softly, “you can touch it. It doesn’t hurt.” It doesn’t _now_ anyway. Shiro decides to spare Keith the gruesome details of the multiple surgeries he’s had over the years. The final one being just over a year ago when he’d reached his full height and a permanent replacement could be safely grafted onto his no longer growing bones.

Keith comes closer, crawling over on his hands and knees and rocking back onto his heels. Their faces are inches apart. Shiro tries not to fixate on how fetching Keith looks in his shirt. He smells of the sea, of saltwater and ocean breezes. It’s not at all unpleasant. Keith’s cool fingers ghost across the raised white flesh of his arm and Shiro has to bite his lip to keep from shivering at his touch. Keith’s fingers move to the scars crisscrossing Shiro’s chest, his violet eyes big and solemn. 

“You should see the other guy,” Shiro deadpans and Keith shoots him a side-eyed glance before his fingers move to the scar covering Shiro’s nose. Shiro doesn’t try to stop him. He stopped being self-conscious about his scars a long time ago. “I got into an argument with a motorboat when I was a kid,” he says softly, “obviously the boat won.”

Keith drops his hand, a troubled frown creasing his brow as he stares directly into Shiro’s eyes. He looks… guilty, Shiro thinks, but before he can ask about it Keith suddenly rises up onto his knees and unexpectedly presses a soft kiss to Shiro’s lips. 

Somehow, It feels like an apology. 

Shiro doesn't even have time to react before Keith is back up on his feet again. “Wait… what? What just happened?” Shiro murmurs, watching Keith disappear through the crevice. “Keith?” Shiro calls after him. He blinks, one eyebrow quirking quizzically. “How is your breath so minty?”

He climbs to his feet and follows after him, climbing out of the crevice onto a sort of natural shelf of stacked limestone. There’s no sign of Keith. Shiro glances down at the churning sea several feet below. Craggy black rocks jut from the water like an uneven row of monster teeth. Foamy white water swirls around them, forming mini water spouts that break apart in a salty spray against the rough shoals. 

Shiro frowns. Keith couldn’t have gone that way. 

There’s a sort of natural stair that leads back down to the beach. It’s narrow and pretty slippery. How did Keith even carry him up here? Shiro wonders, while carefully picking his way down the uneven shelves of gray rock.

He arrives back on the beach. “Keith!” he calls, cupping his hands around his mouth. He glances back over his shoulder at the high stone shelf he just climbed down. The island’s landscape seems to be a mix of sand and rock at the shore and a dense patch of palm trees and other tropical vegetation towards the interior. Shiro wonders how big it is. 

He briefly contemplates searching for Keith in the forest, but ultimately decides against it. The sun is riding low in the sky, not quite touching the horizon, but it’ll be dark in a couple of hours. He wouldn’t want to find himself lost in the woods in the middle of the night. Wherever Keith is, he knows the island better than Shiro does, so Shiro decides to wait for him to return. 

He settles down on the soft white sand, using his artificial hand as a shield against the setting sun. He’s gonna have to figure out some sort of skin protection, or the sun’s gonna burn the flesh right off his back. He wonders how Keith has remained so pale, maybe it’s got something to do with the lack of body hair. Some sort of genetic anomaly that makes his skin especially resistant to sun damage, Shiro theorizes. He idly cuffs his jeans up to his knees and buries his bare feet in the sand.

He watches the rough surf crashing against the shore. A sweeping blanket of water rushes towards him, stopping a few inches in front of him before it reverses course and rushes back out to sea. He squints at the horizon, There’s nothing but blue-green ocean as far as the eye can see. The vastness of it is somehow oppressive. 

He’s not sure how long it’s been since the plane went down. Long enough for night to turn to day at least once. Long enough for his mom to be notified he guesses. He hates the thought of her being alone. He’d never actually considered surviving the crash, but now that he has, he’s terrified that he won’t be able to find his way back home and his mom will spend the rest of her life never knowing that he lived.

He wonders if there’s someone out there mourning Keith right now.

Something catches his eye, a luminous spot further out in the water where the sea turns less turbulent. A chill runs down Shiro’s spine at the sight of it. He stands up, frozen to the spot as he watches the soft lavender glow slide beneath the waves and disappear behind the craggy shoals. For some reason his heart is racing and he’s finding it difficult to breathe. 

A cold hand touches his shoulder and Shiro jumps, whirling round to find Keith standing behind him. He’s completely soaked; Shiro’s sopping shirt clings to his slender body and his long hair is dripping with salty water. There are four fat wriggling fish clutched in his other hand. “Shiro,” he murmurs, his face pinched with concern.

“Keith,” Shiro gasps, impulsively gripping his shoulders, “did you see that?” He turns back towards the shoals, futilely scanning the water for any sign of the glowing creature. He’s shaking, the disjointed flash of a long buried memory striking him with such intensity, his knees threaten to buckle from the strain. 

Keith drops the fish and grabs Shiro just as his legs go out from under him. He grunts when Shiro suddenly sags against him, the wiry muscles in his arms straining as he eases the larger man to a heavy seat on the soft white sand. 

Shiro draws his knees up, hugging himself and gasping for breath. His lungs feel like rocks in his chest and there’s a loud buzzing inside his head. He’s crying. He doesn’t know why. Fat tears slip from his eyes, his body wracked with great heaving sobs. He’s ten-years-old, huddled in a motorboat on the worst day of his life, watching a luminous sea creature playfully race in his boat’s wake. 

It’s the only thing that makes him smile that day.

Then it’s over. The memory recedes and Shiro is twenty again, shivering on a deserted beach with Keith’s arms wrapped around him. Keith’s head is laying on Shiro’s shoulder and he’s softly repeating Shiro’s name over and over again like a mantra. 

Shiro just sits there in silence until his breathing calms and the tears stop spilling from his eyes. He sniffs and scrubs his face. He can feel the color rising in his cheeks as he sheepishly turns his head. Keith lifts his head from Shiro’s shoulder to regard him with big concerned eyes, he doesn’t stop holding him though. Shiro doesn’t think he wants him to.

“Sorry about that,” he says, embarrassed by the unexpected outburst, “a lot’s happened to me today and I think it just kinda… caught up with me all at once.”

Keith’s mouth quirks slightly at that. For a moment, Shiro’s afraid that he might try to kiss him again, but he just presses his forehead to Shiro’s cheek and exhales a long tremulous breath instead. It must have been upsetting for him to just helplessly watch Shiro lose it like that. Shiro closes his eyes and sighs. It’s not that he doesn’t want Keith to kiss him, but Keith’s prolonged isolation and lack of language would just make Shiro feel like he was taking advantage of a vulnerable situation if anything were to happen between them.

He looks at the small pile of fish laying in the sand and swipes the stray tears from his eyes. “Well, I guess there’s no danger of starving as long as you’re around,” he says wryly and Keith smiles. “I just wish I liked fish more.” 

For someone who grew up in the Bay Area, Shiro’s relationship with seafood is lukewarm at best, and he hates sushi, something which his mother has always taken as a personal affront to their Japanese heritage. If she could, she’d probably sue the entire state of California for turning her only son into an avocado loving hippie.

“Fish,” Keith says thoughtfully, as if testing how the word feels on his tongue. He disengages himself from Shiro and gathers the fish together.

Shiro nods. “That’s what they’re called,” he says, “sorry I don’t know what kind they are.”

Keith grins and selects a fish. He grasps it in both hands and raises it to his mouth. “Fish,” he says and Shiro suddenly realizes he’s planning to take a bite out of it, fins, skin, bones and all. 

“Don’t eat it raw!” Shiro cries, utterly horrified. He springs forward and Keith hastily drops the fish, his eyes going wide. “You’ll get botulism or something,” Shiro says, a bit more calmly. He chuckles softly at the baffled look on Keith’s face. “I’ll make a fire.”

“Fire,” Keith echoes uncertainly.

There’s enough driftwood and dried seaweed scattered around the beach for a decent amount of tinder and kindling. Once Keith sees what Shiro is doing, he helps him gather it up, though he still seems pretty confused as to why. Shiro decides to let building the fire serve as the explanation. 

He keeps talking though, about nothing and everything, just to fill up the dead air between them. Keith doesn’t seem to mind. The more Shiro talks the more he seems to understand the words. Shiro is beginning to think that his lack of language may be a forgotten skill rather than the complete absence of one.

At one point he disappears into the trees. Shiro assumes he’s taking a bathroom break, but he returns a few minutes later carrying a plastic milk jug and a couple of abalone shells. Shiro pauses in the midst of scooping out a shallow fire pit and sits back on his heels. “Where’d you get that?” he asks. 

Keith blinks, then points towards the darkening sea.

“It washed up?” Shiro asks. He supposes a lot of trash must find it’s way onto the beach eventually, especially after storms. Shiro must’ve washed up himself. It’s not like Keith could've swum a hundred miles and plucked him out of the middle of the ocean after all. Shiro _is_ baffled as to how he managed to drift all that way without drowning though. He wonders if wreckage from the plane will start washing up at some point as well. 

He’s not sure how to feel about that actually.

Keith nods. He hands one of the shells to Shiro then pours fresh water into it from the milk jug. Shiro drinks two shelffuls before returning to the fire pit. Keith watches fascinated as Shiro stacks the dried seaweed and smaller sticks of driftwood inside the pit. The larger pieces of wood he keeps in reserve for later when the fire’s got some legs. 

There are several methods of starting a fire without matches, but most of them are a huge pain in the butt, so Shiro just uses his hand. He concentrates for a moment and his artificial fingers heat up with an intense violet glow. He touches one of the dried seaweed clumps and it immediately bursts into flame. After a few minutes of carefully stoking it with wood, he’s got a pretty good blaze going. Keith squats down next to him, mesmerized by the bright orange flames. 

Shiro sighs and sits back on his heels. He’s suddenly exhausted and his headache is starting to come back. He winces, gingerly fingering the wound in his scalp. A bit of the paste protecting it flakes off onto his fingers. He squints at it. It looks like crushed tea leaves; some sort of herbal remedy he assumes. Keith is watching him with those somber eyes of his and Shiro flashes what he hopes is a reassuring smile. “I’m okay,” he says. 

He’s trying not to dwell on his… panic attack, but the recovered memory as brief as it was, keeps playing over and over in his head. What are the odds that a second luminous sea creature would cross his path more than 3000 miles from the first one? It had to be a second one right? Stumbling across the same creature from his childhood would be too much of a coincidence to contemplate. It would be the universe trying to tell him something, if he believed in that sort of thing.

“Fish?” Keith murmurs hopefully, and Shiro flashes him a rueful smile, feeling suddenly guilty for making him wait. He must be hungry. Come to think of it, Shiro’s hungry. He can’t remember the last time he ate. There’d been some sort of snack option served on the plane, but it hadn’t seemed very appetizing. Neither does eating a whole fish with no way to gut, scale, or debone it before cooking, but Shiro isn’t quite ready to embrace his inner Gollum and eat it raw either. He seems to recall you can bake fish inside fruit leaves.

“Well, what do you think?” Shiro asks Keith as he skeptically stares at the charred fish Shiro just handed him on a palm leaf plate. Granted, he’s not much of a cook. “You’re probably thinking I ruined a perfectly good fish aren’t you,” Shiro apologizes.

Keith gives the fish a tentative sniff and wrinkles his nose at the unfamiliar aroma. He tears off a ragged chunk and haphazardly pops it into his mouth. Shiro can’t help but laugh at the array of conflicting emotions that march across his face as he cautiously chews it. “I’ll get better at this, I promise,” he says, consuming his own unevenly cooked fish with a bit more care.

The sun has slipped into the sea by the time they’ve finished their meal. Shiro throws a couple of the larger driftwood logs onto the fire and the flames rush to engulf them. It might not be a bad idea to build a bonfire on the beach, he thinks. The trees growing on the island are so green, they’d be ideal for fueling a signal fire with lots of smoke to alert any passing ships or planes in the area. Shiro just has to figure out a way to cut them down and haul them out here.

He slips into the woods for a moment for a bathroom break and when he returns, Keith is sitting by the fire chewing on some sort of plant. A green stem sticks out from between his lips as he methodically works the leafy stalk around the inside of his mouth.

“What have you got there?” Shiro asks curiously, taking a seat beside him in the soft sand.

Keith smiles around the plant and hands a second leafy stem to Shiro. Shiro gives the dart shaped leaves an experimental sniff. “Mint!” he cries, pleasantly surprised. Keith grins. Well, that’s one mystery solved, he thinks. Pretty good natural toothbrush actually. “You’ve really got this place wired huh?” he says.

“Wired,” Keith murmurs, tossing the remains of the mint cutting into the fire.

Shiro chuckles, laying down in the soft sand. Keith joins him a moment later. They watch the stars bloom across the darkening sky. They’re so far from the lights of civilization that Shiro can see the arm of the Milky Way extending out like a crack across the sky above them. Every corner of the sky is saturated with stars. More than he’s ever seen before. He imagines this is how it must have appeared to sixteenth century astronomers. He’s always been a little jealous of their view.

“Those lights up there,” Shiro says softly, “they’re called stars.”

“Stars,” Keith murmurs, stifling a yawn. 

It’s been a long day. Shiro spent most of it sleeping but it was Keith who looked after him, found him shelter and water and food. He must be exhausted. Shiro lifts his arm and Keith moves closer. His skin’s as cold as ice, though he doesn’t seem particularly bothered by it. Shiro pulls him close anyway, sharing his body heat with him. Keith lays his head on Shiro’s chest. His long thick hair is still damp and smells of the sea.

“Most of them are so far away,” Shiro continues, “it takes their light thousands of years to reach us.” Keith sighs. Shiro thinks he may be drifting off, but he keeps talking anyway. It’s too much like being alone when he stops. “We’re looking into the past right now,” he says, “some of those lights burned out a long time ago. We just don’t know it yet.”

He pauses for a moment to locate the constellations. It makes him feel a little closer to home knowing they’re out there. “I used to dream about going to the stars,” he murmurs, “becoming a pilot in the Explorer Corps and visiting other planets, only they wouldn’t take me because of this,” he says, raising his artificial hand and briefly examining it in the glow of the fire light. 

He wiggles his unfeeling fingers, his brow knitting into a disgruntled frown. “They told me the technology was still too new.” Shiro sighs. “Anyway, I’m studying Astrophysics at Caltech now. Studying the stars is almost as good as visiting them,” he says wistfully, “almost.”

Keith raises his head and Shiro startles slightly, he was sure he’d fallen asleep. “Still with me?” he asks wryly.

“Still with you,” Keith says though his eyelids are drooping with exhaustion.

“Hey, you actually answered me that time,” Shiro says proudly. “You’re learning fast.”

“Learning fast,” Keith echoes. He yawns and curls up more tightly against Shiro’s side.

Shiro chuckles. “I wish you could tell me how you wound up here,” he says, thoughtfully, “I’ll bet it’s one hell of a story.” 

Keith doesn’t respond, his damp head is growing heavier on Shiro’s chest.

Shiro yawns. Seems like the events of the day are starting to catch up with him as well. He stares up at the stars. “My dad used to love looking at the stars,” he murmurs. Even now, ten years after his death, Shiro still thinks of his dad every day. “He’s the one who taught me all the constellations,” he briefly considers pointing them out to Keith, but perhaps he’ll save that for another day. “We used to have a boat, not the motorboat a cabin cruiser, my mom sold it after my dad died,” come to think of it, Shiro’s accident might have had something to do with it as well. “We used to stargaze from the deck at night.” 

He thinks a lot about that actually, mostly because of the conversations they had while they were out there. “I really miss him,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper. “We buried him the same day I lost my arm, which was fitting in an odd sort of way, since it already felt like it was gone. Well, not my arm specifically, but a piece of me. The piece of me where he used to live.”

Keith tilts his head, his big eyes glassy in the firelight. Shiro suddenly realizes he’ll fight to stay awake as long as he keeps talking. 

A wan smile touches his lips. “Time to call it a day, I think,” he says.

He’s sure the future will look better tomorrow.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on the [tumblr](https://radiofreekerberos.tumblr.com/)


End file.
